A conventional flash technology based cache device (e.g. SSD) is commonly used to cache frequently accessed “hot” data so that a host (application) access time for the “hot” data is improved. However, flash technology based devices can sustain only a limited number of writes before the flash storage area becomes unreliable or bad. The time when the cache device can sustain the writes reliably is also called a lifetime. After the cache device exhausts the lifetime, the cache device is either bypassed, thereby impacting performance, or the cache device needs to be physically replaced and rebuilt. To extend the lifetime of the cache device, the number of writes to the cache device is minimized. Conventional approaches for handling a cache miss for a host I/O, which is less than a cache-line size, tend to decrease the lifetime by increasing the total number of writes.